French Food Isn’t Just Butter and Cool-Sounding Words

“I’ve wanted to be a chef since I was 4 years old. I’m a humble dude with a skateboard in the back of my truck. I’ll stand behind the ingredients and let them shine before I do.”

This is why Travis Swikard has brought a plate of lightly poached local veggies to the Happy Half Hour studio this week. It’s both not what you expect from a chef who’s trained under some of the biggest global names in French cooking, and exactly what you’d expect from a San Diego native.

When he was working as the right hand of famed chef Daniel Boulud in NYC, Daniel would order the very best raw ingredients he could find, as chefs do. Swikard would unpack the boxes of in-season fruit and veggies. On the side of that box often said the same thing: “San Diego, California.”

So this plate of veggies—served with garlic aioli that’s aerated with a PSI machine into a bowl of aioli fluff, then dusted with dehydrated herbs de Provence—is everything when it comes to explaining the lighter French food at Fleurette. Haurkei turnips from JR Organics. First asparagus of the season from Stehly Farms. And the Cheetos-orange badger flame beets, Nantes carrots, and Pink Beauty carrots? From some guy named Jared in Lakeside.

“These carrots taste like they took the souls of other carrots and made a supernatural heirloom carrot,” says HHH host, Troy Johnson.

Fleurette is not the buttery butter stereotype of French food (a kind of valid but unfair casting of French heritage, since they also gave us lighter, more ingredient-focused movements like cuisine minceur and nouvelle cuisine). Fleurette is “cuisine du soleil,” and butter is barely in the house. It’s lighter, olive oilier, seafood- and veg-forward—world-class ingredients tweaked just enough but also left enough alone.

“Some type of food should taste like it’s been kissed by the sun,” says Swikard.

Of course, since this is HHH and not a graduate seminar in regional French cuisine, the conversation eventually took a hard and proper San Diego turn into Travis’s and Troy’s favorite fish tacos, burritos, sandwiches, and other handheld seafood favorites from across San Diego—shout outs to Oscar’s, Fish Guts, Tunaville, TJ Oyster Bar, and other places where do it messy and perfect.